Ecuadorian Vice-President Otto Sonnenholzner recently said in a post on social media that, thanks to the support of Huawei Cloud, Ecuador has become the first country in Latin America to have an AI-enabled auxiliary diagnostic system in two local hospitals.

Zheng Yelai, president of Huawei Cloud, said, "The AI-enabled system can help doctors make faster, more accurate decisions on whether patients are infected with the virus."

According to the company, it took only 14 hours for Huawei and Huiying to connect the system to a hospital in Ecuador. Hospitals in dozens of countries are contacting Huawei Cloud for possible cooperation to use the system.

Shi Yuxin, deputy head of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, said in an earlier interview that computerized tomography imaging is an important reference for the diagnosis and treatment of novel coronavirus pneumonia.

AI-enabled systems can help classify the pneumonia caused by the virus according to its severity and calculate the burden on the lungs. Traditional quantitative analysis performed by humans usually requires up to six hours, but the AI system is able to perform the same task within a minute, Shi said.